Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.

I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

You will find inner ecstasy when you can be reckless in love.

If we ever have children and they become climbers I'll tell them, Stay away from expeditions. They'll make you poor and neurotic.

The zeal, bravery, and good behavior of the officers and men on the night of June 30, and during July 1, was commendable in the extreme.

Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

You can't make any one person your world. The trick is to take what each can give you and build a world from it.

I'm trying to be slightly happier with myself. No one really wants to be miserable all the time.

Today should always be our most wonderful day.

Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?